


A Million Miles Away

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: High School, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 10:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12319041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: “You got any space facts that taste like bottled water or Coke?” Raylan wonders, lifting his arm to press his face into his t-shirt in a vain attempt to rub the sweat out of his eyes.“They have tropical punch in space,” Boyd answers, then leans forward and chucks his damp, reeking shirt onto his little brother’s head.





	A Million Miles Away

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was: "Could you write something on astronaut story from 4.11? It definitely was one of the Perfect Days from Boyd and Raylan's high school time - Boyd being crazy about space flights, Raylan being crazy about escape and all that." So you have this glimpse of high school, with minor spoilers for the end of season four.

“Do you know Mars is over thirty million miles away? Given our current space travel capabilities, it would take a manned spaceship four years to get there.”

“Nobody fucking cares, Boyd,” Johnny replies, and — since nobody else seems to be paying Boyd any attention — Raylan figures that’s probably true. “Can’t you do something useful, and calculate how much longer this astronaut asshole is going to make us wait?”

They’ve been baking on the bleachers since just after first period, because the “astronaut asshole” was due to land before noon and Principal Pritchard assumed they needed an hour’s lecture on how to behave around a famous person.

It’s possible that they’ve had this lecture coming, on account of last fall when the mayor dropped by and Bowman Crowder hawked a loogie on his fancy, pointy shoes. And somebody might have broken all the windows in his Mercedes with a baseball bat, but there’s no telling who that felonious individual may have been.

But the astronaut’s been delayed, and now it’s going on one in the afternoon on the hottest September day they’ve had in years, and Raylan ain’t complaining about missing Trig but if they don’t get lunch soon he’s liable to wring his sweat-drenched t-shirt out over Pritchard’s bald head.

“Yo, Principal Bitch-ard, where’s our lunch?” Mike Graves shouts from Raylan’s left, and the team stomps the bleachers in support, following that cacophony with a rallying cry of “we want lunch!”

Raylan stomps his old tennis shoes in time to the chanting, but he doesn’t join the others in grinning at Mike or slapping him on the back.

Raylan hasn’t had much to do with Mike since June, when Mr. Graves came to bail his son out of county jail and Raylan had heard Mike tell his daddy that the weed and the moonshine and mailboxes were all what came of Coach letting trash into the locker room.

“If we shot Graves into space,” someone murmurs into Raylan’s ear, their lips brushing the hair sticking out from under his baseball cap, “he’d suffocate in the vacuum. Or maybe burn up in the atmosphere.” Boyd shrugs, his bony shoulder knocking into Raylan’s, shirtless despite Pritchard shouting about dress code, sweat dripping down his tan chest and pooling in the concavities of his stomach and ribs. “Of course, we could just tie him to the helicopter when it lands and hope they cut him loose over Main St.”

Raylan pulls the brim of his hat low, hides his face from the sun but doesn’t quite manage to hide his smirk at the thought of Mike thirty feet in the air, screaming bloody murder and shitting his jeans. It wouldn’t be so easy, he thinks, for daddy to bail Mike out _then_.

“God, I’m starving,” Boyd adds, apropos of nothing, and Raylan finds himself lifting his ass off the bleacher long enough to fish the pack of gum out of his pocket, hands it over though he’d been hiding it from the greedy fingers of the team. Boyd pops a piece free, holds it reverently for a moment before tilting his head back and tossing it up into the air, a long arc downwards into his open mouth. “Raylan Givens, sitting on a hill supplying me with loaves and fishes. Next you’ll be turning water into wine.”

“I leave that to my granddaddy,” he tells Boyd, though they’d drunk up the last of Clyde Givens’s moonshine years ago.

“Did you know that if we ever met an alien race, we’d be most likely to communicate with them through math?”

Raylan actually did know this. Boyd had said it to Señora Little in Spanish class last year, when the teacher had scolded him for not paying attention, told him he’d never get anywhere in this world if he didn’t learn to speak to folks outside his holler.

Raylan made the baseball team freshman year — they didn’t have a JV team, so Coach just took in the decent players and left the young ones on the bench — and Johnny had signed up sophomore year, and Crowders always travelled in packs.

That doesn’t really explain why, when he’s only there for Johnny, Boyd mostly winds up sitting next to Raylan: assemblies in the auditorium, bonfires up at the lake, sweltering days on the bleachers waiting for a helicopter to land.

“You got any space facts that taste like bottled water or Coke?” Raylan wonders, lifting his arm to press his face into his t-shirt in a vain attempt to rub the sweat out of his eyes.

“They have tropical punch in space,” Boyd answers, then leans forward and chucks his damp, reeking shirt onto his little brother’s head.

“What the fuck?” Bowman shouts, spinning around with his fists up, ready to swing.

Boyd grins. He looks unconcerned, though Bowman’s as tall as he is and wider all around. “Bowman,” he calls, focuses his brother’s glower on him. “Why don’t you get us something to drink?”

Raylan ain’t sure, for a second, whether Bowman’s going to launch himself at Boyd or sit back down and ignore him — but then he throws Boyd’s shirt back and stomps off the bleachers and onto the field.

Principal Pritchard retreats a step when he sees Bowman coming. Raylan can understand how the man feels.

Five minutes later, the cafeteria ladies haul out carts of milk cartons and pitchers of kool-aid, along with a bunch of what smell like tuna sandwiches on cheap white bread. Boyd sends Johnny down to fetch them lunch. By the time he returns, Raylan can see the black dot of the helicopter buzzing over the trees.

“How far away could we go in a helicopter?” he asks Boyd, his mouth full of mayonnaise and tuna, sharing a plastic cup of cherry kool-aid. “One million miles? Two? Up into space?”

Boyd shades his eyes, squints at the horizon, calculating distances like he calculates triangles in Trig. “If we had enough gas I bet we could get to NASA,” he says, smiling at Raylan, mayonnaise smeared on his bottom lip. “Then we could catch a ride to Mars.”

Thirty-five million miles away. That doesn’t sound too bad.

Raylan leans back into the fence behind the bleachers, rests his elbows on the rails. “All right,” he agrees, ignores Mike Graves looking over at them and telling Jimmy Cawood IV that “like always finds like.” Boyd passes him the kool-aid, smiling, and Raylan smiles back. “If we’re going to Mars, I guess you’d better tell me what we’ll find.”

Boyd nearly smacks Johnny in the face, weaving red dirt and dust storms with his hands, chattering about freeze-dried ice cream and space suits and biodomes until the rumble of the helicopter kicks up its own dust storm and drowns out his words.

They’ve been melting in the sun for over four hours by the time the astronaut ducks out of the helicopter and waves hello. But when Boyd grabs Raylan’s elbow and squeezes it, hand damp with perspiration and eyes wide — shouting, “Raylan, did you know this man drove a car on the moon?” — Raylan finds he can’t really bring himself to mind.


End file.
